Page 108 of For Real

I took a deep breath. “Your phone number?”

“Course. And text me, so I’ve got yours.” Somehow he managed to say this as though it was perfectly normal. As though we weren’t months overdue.

I reached into my pocket, plucked out my phone, and added Toby to my address book. Texted him my contact card.

Then I pulled out my house keys and slid Robert’s old key off the ring. I’d put it on there for safekeeping when he’d finally moved out, and never got round to removing it.

Initially it had been sentimentality—it was somewhere we were still together, two keys nestled against each other on my key ring—and then just apathy. I handed it to Toby. “This is what I wanted to give you.”

His eyes widened. “Jesus, Laurie.”

“No more sitting on my doorstep, okay? Come whenever you like, whether I’m here or not.”

“Seriously?”

I nodded. “Again, it’s something I should have done weeks ago.”

He arched his hips off the step, wriggled his own set of keys out of his pocket, and added mine to the bunch, where it vanished among the other bits and pieces of Toby’s life. “So what do I get when my next family member dies?”

“I ask you to marry me.”

“That’s so not funny.” It wasn’t, but it was, the way only terrible things can be sometimes. Toby leaned in and kissed me chastely, a little sadly. “Thank you.”

“Will you come in now?”

“Yeah.”

I left him on the sofa, looking a bit like a stranger in his funeral suit, and made him tea and hot buttered toast, because it was the only thing I could think to do for him.

In grief, Toby’s living far outstripped my own, for I had never lost anyone I truly loved. My parents had not been close to their parents, so the death of grandmothers and grandfathers had always been an abstract thing to me. And though I would surely mourn the passing of my own parents, our relationship was one of form and custom, love through duty, and complete mutual incomprehension.

It was strange the way some generations felt unreachably distant and others not at all. In so many ways, I had met all their expectations, but there was still one where I hadn’t and couldn’t. They’d never reproached me for it. In some ways, it might have been easier if they had, because then it would have given me a reason to dislike them.

I suddenly remembered a birthday—twenty-first? twenty-second?—breaking beneath their silence. “Why don’t you ever ask about him?”

My mother had looked momentarily embarrassed, not because of the question, but because I had raised my voice. “I didn’t know you wanted me to,” was all she’d said. And, after that, at the end of every phone call, always and without fail: “How is Robert?” To which I could only ever answer, “Fine.”

The most ironic thing, the cruellest, was that Robert should have been perfect—attractive, well educated, well brought up, ambitious, charming—but for the fact he was a man. All the trappings of civilisation, of good living and eligibility, meant nothing. For he would not bear children. And, while we were together, he could not have married me.

What would my parents think if I ever introduced them to Toby?

And how mortifying—how loathsome and cowardly—to be thirty-seven and still afraid of their disappointment.

I sat on the floor, my head against Toby’s knee, as he nibbled the toast and sipped the tea. I didn’t know what to say to him or how to comfort him. I only knew he was in pain, and that there was nothing I could do to take it away.

The hospital, of course, was full of pain, full of loss, but there I was merely a ferryman. This was different. I had no role to hide behind. There was only the nakedness and helplessness of love.

“You know what sucks?” He put the plate down—he’d hardly eaten anything. But he kept the tea, cradling the cup too tightly, the skin of his hands blotching pink and white.

“Tell me?”

“Nobody liked my granddad except me. He was kind of a horrible person.”3

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this, but perhaps it made it easier for him to dwell on bad memories instead of good. “That doesn’t seem to fit what you’ve told me.”

“No, he was nice to me. But his daughter, that’s my grandmother, hates him—I mean hated him—because he was really strict with her when she was growing up. He used to hit her and stuff. It wasn’t meant to be abusive or anything. It was just the way he’d been raised.”

“He didn’t…?” I wasn’t sure how to finish, or what I would do about the answer.

---